The Tardis Redecorates
by Fandomness
Summary: My explanation behind the Tardis' new look in 'The Snowman'.


_**Here we go. A one shot based on what we have seen in 'The Snowman', Tell me what you think...**_

_**I do not own Doctor Who.**_

_**The Tardis Redecorates**_

He couldn't do it again. Not again. Not after the Ponds. Not after everything and everywhen they'd been through together. Not after all the promises he'd broken. Not another person to lose. He was so tired of the hurt. That never ending ache in his chest that never went away. So tired of picking up the fractured pieces of his hearts. Of yielding time like a knife and then having it slip through his fingers. Of having the tide come in and wash away the possibility the sand represents and leaving him stranded in reality. How much longer could he last before the bitterness consumed him? It'd had him once...centuries ago, held between it's jaws with nothing to live for, going through the motions of fighting while he waited for the universe to bring him to his knees.

And then she'd come... even then she'd been like a golden light. So filled with potential for more then just a London shop girl. Filled with that spark that all his companions had, rational fear, she stood beside him quaking with horror at the things she'd just seen, and made small talk, she barely batted an eye at the death of Wilson the electrician, another in a long line of people he'd failed to save. She'd swallowed the reality of the Tardis more quickly then anyone he'd known before, she'd stared into the eyes of the Oncoming Storm and demanded he accept the significance of one man. Ricky the Idiot. Mickey the Hero.

She'd pulled him from the brink of condemnation, helped him wash the blood from his hands and shoulder the burden of genocide and dispelled the loneliness. She's opened his closed hearts, bandaged some of the fractures and bruises they'd suffered and then ripped them to shreds again when she had left. Been lost. But even then his hearts wouldn't close, despite how he tried, they'd welcomed Martha to him though he fought and kicked. And she hadn't been Rose. No. there would only ever be one Rose Tyler. But Martha Jones had recognized the hurt in him. She'd gathered as much of his hearts as he would give her and tried to help him piece them together again. And he'd ruined her life. Stolen a year and filled it with a fraction of the anguish he suffered, to much for a human heart to stand. And in the end she'd left him, not that he blamed her. Foregoing adventure for a more mundane life. And how he'd envied her.

He had longed to live as the humans did then. As he did so often. Longed for the simplicity of four walls and a mortgage. Longed for a car and neighbors and barbecues in the summer. Domestics. Happiness. But there was only one person in all the universes he would've wanted to share that with...but even then his hearts hadn't learned. Had pushed on through the pain. And he found Donna. Mad, crazy, wonderful Donna! The most important women in the universe... and she had been just what he needed in that moment. She'd snapped him from his own pity, demanding the world from him and he'd been only to happy to oblige. She'd swept him up in the sights, forced him to look at the good and absurd things that surrounded him, accepted what Martha couldn't about his life and the choices he made.

She had been his best friend, the Doctor-Donna. Ready to take on the universe with him, ready for forever and always, ready for the hard times and the happy ones. She'd helped him laugh at the wonderful coincidences of the universe, opened his mind back up to the prospect of family, help him pull through the hurt of to many centuries and come out laughing. She'd given everything for him. And he'd taken everything from her...every moment, ever dream, everything. And that was when his body finally gave out, when his mind could take it no longer, when he looked in the mirror and didn't like or recognize what he saw there. The Time Lord Victorious. Ha. A petty title. For a man to swollen with power and pride to be good anymore.

And he'd changed. Into this. Into _him. _The Doctor's hands fumbled across a bar he couldn't see anymore, his fingers curling around the neck of a bottle and bringing it to his mouth for him to drain. The Doctor grimaced as the whiskey burned a trail down his throat, mixing with the hollow agony already settled into his stomach, as well as the liters of alcohol he'd already drank.

The eleventh incarnation of himself. He gave a snort of derision, gesturing to one of the barman's many heads for another drink. Young and carefree...all the pain in his life pushed away into a secret part of his brain from which it hoped to never surface. And that was fine, he was happy to forget, to pretend. To push it all down and be the nutter everyone took him for. Nothing wrong with that. The barkeep plunked another amber bottle in front of the Doctor's nose and took away the glass he had discarded after the first shot several hours earlier. He soniced it open awkwardly, his eyes refusing to focus.

He'd met Amy. The brave, Scottish girl trapped in northern England with the fiery ginger hair. He'd let himself forget about the fates of the people that came before her, focusing only on his own loneliness. He'd swept her up in his wake, twisted her childhood into something broken and unhealthy. The Doctor knocked back a swig from his bottle, remember her young face, already guarded and suspicious, but so brave, alone in that big empty house... how could he resist? His mouth twisted bitterly and he ran a hand down his face. The pub's back room had long ago become nothing but a blur of dark colors,the stench of stale smoke and wood polish outweighed by the reek of his own breath.

And then there had been Rory, the bumbling nurse he never took seriously, the man who would one day come to outlive him, two-thousand years, the last centurion, no longer just a companion of the Doctor, but a legend in his own right. And he'd taken them with him. Bundled them up into the Tardis and took them to see the universe. Amy and Rory, the Ponds. His Ponds. They had been with him through his worst hour, waited for him while they juggled their lives, shared in new adventures and given him one of the most important people in his life.

He stopped, the mouth of the bottle poised at his lips. His eyes glistening with tears he refused to shed. His thoughts on her. His wife. Professor River Song. His eyes grew suddenly hard and he took another large mouthful of the inebriating liquid. He was angry at her. At River. She'd left him. Alone. Her parents had- he swallowed the pain, his knuckles white around around the bottle top. Died. He forced himself to think it, to remember their gravestone already crumbling with age and some of the anger came back. They'd died. His hearts had broken and she'd left him! With a shaky smirk and a sarcastic word she'd left him...He threw the bottle to the floor with a roar and a smash that silenced the entire tavern, people turning in their seats to look at him. The eccentric looking, drunkard standing over a puddle of fragments and good whiskey, his hands in white fists and unfocused eyes filled with a violent darkness the likes of which they would never see again.

The Doctor forced himself to relax, forced himself back into his seat, allowing his head to fall against his arms tiredly as he listened numbly to the activity picking up again. Alone. Once again alone. No Rose, no Martha, no Donna or the Ponds. Not even River was there to keep him from breaking. He was alone. And this time. This time. He vowed to stay that way. Slapping to many bills down onto the bar, and snatching another bottle from the patron beside him the Doctor rose and blundered his way from the bar.

The Tardis sat demurely across the street, the one thing in his life that had always been constant, no matter what he did. She was still there. Still scarred from her trip to New York and the beatings she'd received there, her paint peeled away, wood cracked, waiting faithfully for the Time Lord she'd ran away with all that long time ago. The Doctor ran a fond hand down her side as he pushed open the door. The lights in the control dimmed considerably, making it seem grey and empty. Keeping a steady stream of liquid pouring down his throat, to numb now to notice the burn, he tottered around the console, twisting dials and flipping levers, pressing an unsteady hand into the keys of the type writer, hardly caring what he was doing. With a shaking lurch the Tardis left the galactic bar behind, swerving off through the vortex as drunkenly as her driver and sprawling the Time Lord onto his back, vodka spilling out into his hair and bleeding down into his eyes, making them burn and water. She careened unsteadily into reality landing with a dull thumping crash in Victorian London, the Doctor tumbling through the doors to land splayed into the snow beyond.

There in the darkness of night under the moon's judging eyes and with the excuse of Vodka, and the billows of smoke curling out of the Tardis the Doctor buried his head against his hands and wept for everything he'd lost in twelve hundred years, cried the broken pieces of his heart out onto the ice, emptied himself of every emotion except pain and resigned himself to an eternity alone. While the Tardis looked on, her doors slowly closing, stripping the desktop of all the joy she'd filled it with, eating away the golden nonsense and letting dark grey practicality take over. The Doctor's Tardis. A symbol of traditional Galifreyan ideals...the universe slowly breaking around it.

THE END


End file.
